Marshall County, Tennessee

Marshall County History, Geography, Demographics, Cities and Towns, and Education

County Seat: Lewisburg
Year Organized: 1836
Square Miles: 375

Court House:

2205 Courthouse Annex
Lewisburg, TN 37091-3371

Etymology - Origin of County Name

Named in honor of John Marshall (1755-1835), Revolutionary War soldier and Federalist leader, US congressman, secretary of state, and chief justice of the US Supreme Court.

Demographics:

County QuickFacts: Census Bureau Quick Facts

History of Marshall County

Created 1836 from Giles, Bedford, Lincoln and Maury counties; named in honor of John Marshall (1755-1835), Revolutionary War soldier and Federalist leader, US congressman, secretary of state, and chief justice of the US Supreme Court.

Marshall County was formed in 1836 from Bedford, Lincoln and Maury counties. (Private Acts of Tennessee 1835-36, Chapter 35).

There were fires at the Marshall County courthouse in 1872 and 1927.

Established by the Tennessee General Assembly in 1836, Marshall County was formed from parts of Giles, Bedford, Lincoln, and Maury Counties. Its name honors former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall of Virginia. The members of the first county court, with William McClure as chairman and David McGahey as secretary, met at the home of Abner Houston, who had donated land for a county seat. James Osborne, William Williams, Joel Yowell, Aaron Boyd, and James C. Record then served as a committee to build a courthouse and jail, lay out the new town's streets, and sell lots. The county seat was named Lewisburg in honor of Meriwether Lewis of the Lewis and Clark expedition, who died in adjacent Lewis County. Lewisburg today is an attractive rural town of 10,413. The town square is dominated by the Marshall County Courthouse (1929), a Colonial Revival-style building designed by the Nashville architectural firm of Hart Freeland Roberts and later modernized by the same firm in the mid-1970s. Other Lewisburg landmarks include the National Register-listed Adams House, a Queen Anne-style dwelling built by local civic capitalist and town mayor Joe C. Adams circa 1900; the Art Deco-style Dixie Theater; a Colonial Revival-style post office constructed by the Works Progress Administration in 1935; and the Ladies Rest Room (1924), the first known independent building constructed in Tennessee for the sole purpose of providing a place for country women to relax, rest, and eat when they visited the town square in the early twentieth century. The National Register-listed Ladies Rest Room remained in service for visitors to the end of the century.

Cornersville, the county's second largest town with 962 residents, is at the south end of Marshall County. It grew by almost 41 percent between 1990 and 2000. Several outstanding antebellum homes are nearby and the Cornersville United Methodist Church (1852), a Greek Revival-style brick building, is listed on the National Register. Chapel Hill, the county's third largest town with 943 residents, is at the north end of Marshall County. Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest was born at a nearby farm; the Forrest homeplace is currently under restoration by the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Other villages in Marshall County include Belfast, Farmington, Verona, and Berlin, famous as a location for political stump speeches during the antebellum era

Find more from the Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture: MARSHALL COUNTY

Geography

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the county has a total area of 376 square miles (974 km²), of which, 375 square miles (972 km²) of it is land and 1 square miles (2 km²) of it (0.20%) is water. The Duck River runs through the Henry Horton State Park.

Neighboring Counties:

Rutherford County (northeast)
Bedford County (east)
Lincoln County (southeast)
Giles County (southwest)
Maury County (west)
Williamson County (northwest)

Cities and Towns:

- Chapel Hill	town	Incorporated Area
- Cornersville	town	Incorporated Area
- Lewisburg (County Seat)	city	Incorporated Area

County Resources:

Enter County Resources and Information Here

County Resource Guide

Counties: US Map

The history of our nation can be seen as a prolonged struggle to define the relative roles and powers of our governments: federal, state, and local. And the names we've given our counties, our most locally based jurisdictions, reflects the "characteristic features of our country!"

But age, size and colorful names of our counties isn't the only reason to explore counties' role in American history, or the history of county government itself. In fact, the story of county government reflects the larger meanings of American history.

Today's counties are the most flexible, locally responsive and creative governments in the US. They are the most diverse, varying in size, population, geography, and governmental structure. In their politics and policies, they express a 1990's political slogan "Think globally, act locally."

Penn Foster High School

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